Ivan Fischer Returns to Mostly Mozart With ‘Nozze di Figaro’

Two years ago, a neophyte stage director, unknown among opera cognoscenti and untested in New York, scored a major triumph in his Lincoln Center debut. The opera he directed was a repertory staple, yet paradoxically a work that has stymied seasoned artists recently assigned to stage it at the Metropolitan Opera. This newcomer not only offered a vision unlike any seen previously in New York, but also pulled it off without any sets or props — or, for that matter, an opera house.

The presenter was the Mostly Mozart Festival, which in the last decade has shed its stodgy reputation of old completely — O.K., almost — recasting itself as a series where emerging talent shines, and novel things happen. The director was Ivan Fischer, the music director of the great Budapest Festival Orchestra, which played the New York engagement. The opera was Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” for which Mr. Fischer used the bodies of chorus members as scenery, sets, even furniture.

“In the ‘Don Giovanni,’ there was a central element for me, which was the human body, and everything was built from it,” Mr. Fischer said from Hungary during a recent interview via Skype . “There was no set, there were no props — only body parts. This idea came to me because I thought that some people, these people who are so woman thirsty, probably don’t see the other things. As they go through the world, they don’t see the objects. They only see the body parts.” Mr. Fischer’s notion, then, was to show the world as seen through Giovanni’s eyes.

This week, Mr. Fischer returns to Mostly Mozart with his second directorial effort: Mozart’s “Nozze di Figaro,” to be presented with the Budapest Festival Orchestra in three performances at the Rose Theater, starting Sunday. Unsurprisingly, given the overwhelming response to his 2011 production, the shows are sold out.

Like “Giovanni,” “Figaro” belongs to the great trilogy of operas that Mozart created with the librettist Lorenzo da Ponte. (“Così Fan Tutte” is the third.) Again, Mr. Fischer has built his stage conception around a sole element: apparel, along with its implicit ties to identity and social status. “A boy dresses up and becomes a girl, who is actually a girl pretending to be a boy, so we are in a double twist already,” Mr. Fischer explained, referring to Cherubino, a male role played by a female singer.

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Mr. Fischer, the music director of the Budapest Festival Orchestra, who is returning to Mostly Mozart with his second directorial effort: Mozart’s “Nozze di Figaro.”Credit
Budapest Festival Orchestra

“There are changes of identities among the social classes, which must have been an incredibly important thing for the time,” Mr. Fischer said. “When a maid dresses up in a countess’s dresses, it’s really stepping out of your identity. And this being able to change your sex, your social status, everything, is liberating in a way, because you can be somebody other than who you are.”

In Mr. Fischer’s staging — initially presented in Budapest in 2009 and revived there in February — the orchestra is seated onstage in full view. Vocal soloists and chorus members dash around and among the players during the overture, donning outfits snatched from an onstage rack with the genteel frenzy of a sample sale at a couture outlet. Other costumes hang suspended overhead.

“There are costumes floating around, and they occasionally meet the people and help them to change their identity, and then they go away,” Mr. Fischer said. “And then I also went a step further: I thought it was very nice to dress up the whole event. We start like a concert, and then the concert changes its identity and becomes an opera.”

Charming transformations aside, starting “Figaro” as a concert helps to tie this undertaking to an unconventional maestro’s broader career. Although he helped to start and acted in an avant-garde theater troupe when he was 18, Mr. Fischer never trained formally as a theatrical artist or director. Later, working as a conductor in opera houses gave him firsthand insights into the techniques of stagecraft.

Still, few conductors have plumbed the standard repertory more assiduously than Mr. Fischer, who is known for rearranging his players to emphasize structural and even dramaturgical ideas about the music. In 2010, during a concert presented as part of a Beethoven symphony cycle at Lincoln Center, he reset his ensemble differently for the Sixth and Ninth Symphonies, to illuminating effect.

“At the very last minute, he decided to put the chorus on the orchestra floor in front of the orchestra, so you wouldn’t even know that they were there,” Jane Moss, Lincoln Center’s vice president for programming, said about that account of the Ninth. Wind players, she recalled, were scattered throughout the orchestra. The timpanist, whose role in the symphony is unusually prominent, sat in the front row.

“He has a sense of the theatrical and the visual,” Ms. Moss said. “And in that Beethoven Nine, where I was thinking, ‘Oy vey, where is this going?’ it was stunning.” The experience caused her to pay attention when Mr. Fischer proposed his “Don Giovanni.” Having agreed to present the production, Ms. Moss traveled to Budapest to see it. In a meeting the night before the performance, Mr. Fischer described to her what he had done.

“As he described it to me, I thought, ‘Oh, no,’ ” Ms. Moss recalled, laughing. “It just sounded like a mime show or something, the way he described it. And then I saw it, and was completely knocked out by it. For me, it did achieve a synthesis of the theatrical and the musical that I actually had not experienced before.”

That synthesis, Mr. Fischer explained, was exactly what he intended when he took on the Mozart operas, in pursuit of what he called an “organic” performance. “In our conventional duality, where you have a director and a conductor, even if they are the best possible people, it’s not the same, what you see and what you hear, because they understand their roles differently,” Mr. Fischer said. “The conductor thinks that he is the priest who has to defend the Bible — the score — and the director thinks that he is the modern artist who has to bring the opera closer to modern-day audiences.”

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Stated that way, Mr. Fischer’s remarks stand in marked contrast to the German notion of Regietheater (“director’s theater”), which has seen standard repertory operas interpreted in styles that drastically deviate not only from conventional representations, but also from the notional content expressed by the works themselves. (The new Bayreuth Festival production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, staged by Frank Castorf, has been cited widely as a notorious example of directorial excess.)

Mr. Fischer, by contrast, hoped to create organic unity, “where what you see and what you hear express the same thing,” he said. “I’m interested in a modern theatrical language, but only in a complete harmony with the music making. And so I recognized that it’s best if I do it myself.”

The singers he has worked with, he pointed out, have embraced his ideas overwhelmingly. “They live in a completely enchanted state,” he said, his pride showing. “They say, wherever we work, we are always pulled in two directions, and here, suddenly, it’s so easy and natural. And that gives me some positive feedback.”

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Mr. Fischer’s “Don Giovanni” at Lincoln Center in 2011.Credit
Ruby Washington/The New York Times

Hanno Müller-Brachmann, the German bass-baritone who plays Figaro in Mr. Fischer’s production, corroborated the conductor’s impression emphatically during a telephone interview. Mr. Müller-Brachmann, a member of the Berlin State Opera from 1998 to 2011, said that he had appreciated perhaps only five productions during his 13-year tenure.

“This is the business of our time: There are so many directors who want to tell a story, and then they choose a piece to tell their story,” he said. “But most of them don’t tell the piece.” Mr. Fischer, he said, has approached his directorial efforts with a mastery of Mozart’s operas, and sometimes showed cast members what he wanted by acting it out for them.

Fidelity to the source, Mr. Müller-Brachmann insisted, can provide a discerning audience with all the relevance it requires. “The piece is playing in the time of the French Revolution, and this obsession of being a count or being a servant is very, very important,” he said. “When you see there are countries in Europe like Hungary, who are still discussing free press and free expression, I think it’s quite actual. And it was very special to do it in Budapest with this orchestra.”

For Mr. Fischer, who has been an outspoken opponent of radical-right nationalism and intolerance on the rise among some politicians and factions, creating such work in Budapest is crucial. Despite the demands of a flourishing international career and a new post as the chief conductor of the Konzerthaus Orchestra in Berlin, he insists on making his home in Hungary.

Expressing his opinions, he said, has not impacted his ability to work. “It’s more that I’m worried for other people,” he said, citing Hungary’s Gypsy minority as one imperiled population. Recently, he related, he had lent his support to another cause.

“I made a big speech at Budapest Pride, where gay people don’t have an easy situation,” he said. “Many of them don’t dare to go out, because when they have their demonstrations, the extreme-right radicals threaten them. I found it important to go speak for them and encourage them. So this is more what I do. I stand up for other people. I’m not worried about my own possibilities.”

A version of this article appears in print on August 11, 2013, on Page AR8 of the New York edition with the headline: Cloaking an Opera in a New Identity. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe